The world's energy demand is increasing, and the fossil fuel sources are depleted, leading to increasing competition for the available energy sources, and thereby hampering economical growth by high energy prices. To overcome this situation renewable energy sources must be brought into exploitation. The only renewable energy source with sufficient capacity to cover significant parts of the energy demand is biomass conversion. Biomass is efficiently converted into heating and electricity by existing technologies, but transportation fuels, which accounts for one third of the total energy consumption, must be available as high energy density fluids, preferably compatible with fossil fuels like diesel oil and gasoline. Therefore technologies for transforming and intensifying the energy content of biomass are required.
At the same time all kinds of waste are produced all over the world from factories, households etc., and as a result waste disposal has increased to an insuperable amount of waste over the last decades. Dumping of waste has become an increasingly problem and therefore a cheap effective dispose of waste has become increasingly more important.
A known method of waste disposal is refuse incineration. But numerous wastes are due to the high water content not suitable for incineration, e.g. sewage sludge and industrial waste water treatment residues. Incineration of such wastes require additional energy input, i.e. the overall process energy is negative.
In view of this new methods have been developed for treatment of such wastes. However these known methods are still very limited in regards to the kind of waste, which may be treated in the same apparatus and in regards to how much of the converted waste which is turned into recyclable products. Additionally, the energy of the organic material, which is converted into recyclable products are still very low compared to the amount of energy added to the method. Therefore in order to make conversion of organic material commercial interesting there is still a need of a more energy effective process.
Furthermore, known methods have shown that char and soot deposit inside the apparatus in such an amount that regular cleaning of the apparatus is needed. Such cleaning operations are time consuming and therefore expensive.
Corrosion of the materials used for making apparatus for the converting of organic material has in known methods been such a problem that the materials for these components had to be chosen in a more expensive group of materials. This problem of corrosion has increased the cost of the apparatus for the converting and therefore decreased the incentive for using converting of waste instead of refuse incineration.